


The Twentieth Century

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Twentieth Century, Angst, Canon Era, Gen, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-14 00:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2171322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy."</p><p>The Amis de l'ABC get a glimpse of the twentieth century.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. utopie

**Author's Note:**

> "Rien n'est tel que le rêve pour engendrer l'avenir. Utopie aujourd'hui, chair et os demain."
> 
> "There is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow."
> 
> \--Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 3.4.1

It's a quiet Saturday afternoon in the Musain. After a brief flurry of demonstrations that seems to be simply part of the atmosphere of a Parisian spring, the city has calmed down, settling in for the summer; the Amis de l'ABC are busying themselves with the more tedious but less terrifying work of building the conversations that happen all over the city--in the cafes and the workshops and the universities--the conversations that will translate to boots in the street when the time finally comes. A round of pamphlets a few weeks ago was an encouraging success, and now a second pamphlet is scattered across the Musain's tables in various heavily annotated drafts.

Joly is bent over one of them now, chewing his lower lip as he tries to find a more precise way to explain the proposed changes to the electoral system, but his concentration is sorely threatened by the amusing and very sensual anecdote that Bossuet is relating to Grantaire. At one of the other tables, Enjolras and Feuilly and Combeferre are deep in conversation, their own drafts forgotten in the jumble of papers and maps spread out before them. Feuilly's voice, raised in enthusiasm, cuts through the warm, lazy afternoon quiet.

"How can you call this age glorious? How, when every country in the world is burdened with oppression and injustice? The kings and aristocrats become more powerful every day, and there is so little the poor can do to change things."

"But there is progress!" Enjolras insists. "What you say is true; there is enough injustice in the world to drive a man to despair. But there are also people working to better the world, to bring light to the darkness and relief for the oppressed."

As he is speaking, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, and Prouvaire clatter up the stairs from the lower room, bearing with them bottles of wine and the end of a very heated argument about hat fashion.

"What are we fighting about?" Courfeyrac demands cheerfully, falling into a chair beside Combeferre and propping his chin on his hands. "I need a new argument, for these two idiots refuse to see reason. Feathers, indeed!"

"We are discussing whether the world is descending into darkness and misery or raising itself up to a glorious new age," Combeferre explains, a smile twitching at his lips. "Feuilly is arguing the part of misery, and Enjolras is, as ever, attempting to defend the world."

"In fairness," Feuilly puts in, "our disagreement was over whether this century can truly be called 'glorious'--not over what direction it is headed in the future. I stand by what I said: I don't believe the world, as it is now, has any claim to the word 'great.' But if it goes on the way Enjolras claims it will, it  _might_ come to earn the name. In time."

"And it will, Feuilly," Enjolras says. "Every day we learn about another injustice--but that is only because every day another person stands up to bring it before us. Here in France, the tide is turning, the people coming together to defend themselves against those who would oppress them, the murmurs growing louder by the day. And I'm sure it will follow in the other parts of the world as well. The world is waking up, and it  _will_ pull itself out of the darkness and into a new age."

"The century is still young," Courfeyrac agrees. "We've seventy more years--all right, sixty-nine--to make progress. Surely that's enough time to earn the right to be glorious?"

"Not only in the realm of politics are we making progress," Combeferre says slowly, thinking out loud. "When I consider how different things are in our hospitals and in our scientific texts than they were thirty years ago, it gives me great hope for the state of things in another seventy years' time."

"And just think how much faster things will progress, once the governments of the world are reformed, so that the state serves the people and not the other way around, and humanity can focus our energies on improving the world in other realms!" Enjolras gestures wildly with a blotter, caught up in the glorious future he's imagining. "When we don't have to devote our time to righting wrongs, when science and art and industry can work to improve the lives of the common man. Your medicine will take off like wildfire, I can see it--new discoveries every day, diseases cured that today are a death sentence, surgery without pain!"

"Can you imagine, in fifty years, or a hundred?" Joly crows from across the room, his work on the pamphlet forgotten. "We'll have solved the mysteries of the brain; women won't die in childbirth; the lame will walk again, and we'll be able to repair the eyes of the blind!"

"What about other realms of science?" Bossuet suggests. "What do you suppose the naturalists of the future will have learned?"

Joly takes up his train of thought. "Ah! They might understand how animals communicate--"

"--what causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions--"

"--how birds fly--"

"--we might even learn to fly ourselves," Bossuet chuckles, "given enough time."

"Just think of the things future generations will understand! The nature of light, and electricity, and magnetism--and--and the galaxies!" Combeferre rushes on, stumbling over his words in his excitement. "The dark stars, the boundaries of the universe--"

"But don't forget what those discoveries will mean for industry," Courfeyrac says. "When we can put our knowledge to work for us, to improve the tending of our crops, the production of goods, the building and maintenance of our cities. The material prosperity will be immense, of course, but think of the time saved!" He leans forward, eyes flashing with excitement. "Leisure will be no longer the luxury of the rich, but the reality of the common man. And people who today have to work every waking hour to earn their daily bread will have the liberty to travel, to engage in the arts . . ."

"To go to school." Feuilly smiles. "No more gamins in the street; every child will have the chance to learn not only what he needs to make his way in the world, but to become a member of society, to learn about his own rights and responsibilities."

"And to share in the progress of the sciences," Combeferre adds. "The discoveries science unlocks won't be just the property of a privileged few, but every man and woman will have the chance to learn the wonderful, beautiful mysteries of the universe."

"And with education, people will break free of the prisons of thought that they are now bound by!" Prouvaire jumps up and starts pacing, unable as ever to stay still when his mind is busy. "All the patterns of thinking and the lies we are trained to believe--future generations will grow up free of those. Our eyes will be opened, and we will see things as they truly are."

"We _might_ even come to the radical belief that women are real human beings, with the same minds and rights as men," Bahorel laughs. "Not in fifty years, perhaps, but in a hundred."

"Society's thoughts on the matter are already changing," Combeferre points out. "By the twentieth century, I believe this could be a universally accepted truth. For outward progress--in the sciences, in industry, in political forms--must be accompanied by a corresponding change in our inward lives. As we improve the tools we use to interact with the world, the attitudes and beliefs with which we approach it will develop as well. I believe future generations will recognize the errors in many of our commonly-held beliefs and set them aside--such as the inequality of the sexes."

"Or strife between the races?" Joly suggests.

"Exactly. Or other things that we today don't even recognize as wrong. It will be a slow, gradual development, of course--we may not even see the change in our own lifetimes--but in time, moral progress will transform the world just as surely as scientific progress."

"Yes, yes," Courfeyrac says, "we'll grow blind to the divisions that separate us now, and finally recognize each other's humanity."

"People will be free to love whomever they wish," Bossuet murmurs. "No matter their--no matter what."

Grantaire, leaning back in his chair with a wry grin on his face, gives a harsh bark of a laugh. "Yes, and men will walk upon the moon."

Prouvaire's eyes light up. "Yes, yes!" he agrees, completely missing the sarcasm in Grantaire's tone. "We shall walk in the heavens and touch the stars."

Enjolras, who has been listening to his friends' discussion with shining eyes, lifts his glass--a salute to the beautiful world their efforts will achieve for future generations. "My friends, the nineteenth century will be great, but the twentieth century will be happy."

 


	2. chair et os

Enjolras awakes with a start, aware that he was jarred from sleep by a loud noise, but unable to remember what the noise was. He sits up--and then the world reels around him.

It’s like singing one song while another one is being played. Like drawing circles with one hand and squares with the other. Like hearing convincing proofs for two opposing theories.

He’s still Julien Enjolras, citizen of Paris, leader of the Amis de L’ABC . . . but he’s also Marc Guiderot, a farmer’s son from the countryside around Rheims. And the year--he knows the year is 1832, but somehow at the same time, he knows it’s 1917.

It’s 1917! He sits up suddenly, eager to see this new world, and the man lying in the mud beside him (Jacques, one of the men under his command, the other part of his brain supplies) gives him a curious look. Marc--Enjolras--they--he tries to pretend he just sat up to scratch a stubborn itch on his back, but he can’t help but look eagerly around him--at the future.

They are slumped against the mud wall of a ditch about as deep as a man is tall, propped up here and there by timbers. A little trickle of muddy water runs down the center of it, and the men crouched in little knots here and there along its length have their legs curled up under them to keep their boots dry. It stretches about fifty meters in both directions before turning at right angles and going out of sight. But it has the look of something that continues on for a long way.

_ All the way across France,  _ Marc’s memories tell him. 

It’s a strange thing to be startled by information he already knows inside and out, but as he remembers more about the great battle line slashed across his country, the years of young men being pumped in to feed a vicious stalemate, the ravaged countryside and bombed-out fields, Enjolras forgets the uncanny feeling in the wave of nausea that washes over him.  _ Three years _ they’ve been fighting here. Thousands of men have died. 

France might fall entirely, might cease to be.

He scrambles to his feet and peers out toward the enemy lines. It’s a gray, ugly day, the air full of fog, and the other trench is only a faint dark smudge on the horizon. But other, closer mounds catch his attention. Mounds clothed in dull blue coats like his own.

They’re the men from his unit who died two weeks ago, he--Marc--recalls. Them, and some from the unit who defended this small scrap of ditch before they were blown to bits and Marc’s own unit was sent up to take their place. Plus some others, not French. Marc doesn’t know for sure if they were his enemies or his allies . . . the bodies had been there a long time when he arrived. Climb out of your hole to bury your friend and you’d just be going to join him up in no-man’s land, the little scrap of land between the two sides that didn't belong to any country. At least it wasn’t summer, with the sun cooking the poor stiffs.

There’s a whine overhead, and then a dull  _ thunk _ from somewhere up the line. A moment later, the sound of shouts, and then, worse, strangled screams. An ugly yellow-green smoke comes creeping down the trench from the direction of the sounds, a heavy fog that clings to the ground but advances steadily, inescapably.

Marc knows what it is, but his thoughts are so panicked that Enjolras can’t catch them. All he knows is this is bad and Marc is  _ scared _ . Already a mask is in his shaking hands and he’s pulling it on over his head, not aware of the faint whimper escaping from his lips until the mask is over his mouth, trapping the sound inside.

Jacques isn’t as quick--or as lucky--and the yellow gas is already around them as he fumbles his mask out, bringing it up to his mouth with blistering hands. But he’s trembling and choking, and the mask drops from his shaking fingers. He falls to his knees, gasping for air that will kill him.

Enjolras falls on the discarded mask, rolling Jacques over and shoving the mask up against his screaming mouth. It feels like he’s suffocating his soldier, holding the mask down against his face while he writhes under his hands, and Enjolras is weeping inside his own mask. Because up and down the line--all across Europe--boys are dying just like the one at his feet, for a war that seems like it will never end.

* * *

Bahorel doesn’t waste time worrying about the  _ how _ and  _ why _ and  _ what the hell _ when he wakes up in someone else’s body in a different century. It happened, it’s bizarre, but one look around him makes clear that there are bigger problems going on here.

The land-- _ my _ land, the other voice inside his head whispers, pride mixed with sorrow--has been destroyed. Devastated. Bahorel is a farmer’s son; he knows what good farmland looks like, all wet and black and smelling of living things and dead things when you turn up a spadeful of it. This land is colorless. Dry. It smells of nothing but dust.

A few plants struggle up out of the thin soil, their leaves brown and shriveled, stunted beyond recognition.  _ Corn _ , something supplies.  _ They’re meant to be corn. _ They’ll see maybe two dozen ears of it at harvest time, and no wonder, with the soil so thin you can practically see through it. He squats down and picks up a handful of dirt and it sifts away through his fingers like powder.

They haven't seen rain in more days than Bahorel can count.

A part of Bahorel’s other mind remembers a time, far back, when things were different. The grassland had been a tangle of weeds, sturdy broad-leafed grasses and delicate little red flowers that hid among them. The ground held the water when it rained, and the crops grew--grew well. He was a little boy then, playing hide-and-seek in his grandfather’s field, the furrows cool and damp under his bare feet, the corn towering over his head.

He looks down at his hands and sees that they are wrinkled, discolored with age spots. Worn out and dried out like the land.

And Bahorel wants to yell, wants to hit something, wants to run until his lungs are heaving and his legs give out--because there’s nothing he can do. The land is all he has, and he’s done for it all he can, all he knows how to do. And it just keeps dying under his feet.

A breeze rises, whipping up dust, and Bahorel’s eyes automatically squint against it. But there’s no blocking out the dust entirely. You can’t stop it. It gets into your clothes, blows through the tiny cracks in the walls of his hut. You find it in your mouth when you wake up. You find it everywhere--everywhere except where it’s supposed to be, out in the fields so the crops can grow, so another one of your children won’t starve.

Bahorel sinks to his knees, eyes stinging, and watches his land blow away on the wind.

* * *

Courfeyrac wakes up, and feels nothing but exhaustion. It's an effort to open his eyes. It's an effort to slide out of the shallow bunk he's lying on--the next bed above him just a few handspans above his face. Each breath seems to cost him more energy than it gains.

And emotionally, he's exhausted as well. Empty. Raw. He doesn't remember what it was that hurt him--and he feels instinctively that thinking of it might take more strength than he has--but he knows it wounded him again and again and again, until the pain of it was etched through every part of him, until he couldn't do anything without hurting. He can feel the scars from it inside him.

He looks at his hands and sees ashen skin stretched tight over bones. His clothes are gray and threadbare. His shoes are layers of knotted rags. He lifts the shirt and he can count his ribs; the bones of his hips jut out from his sunken abdomen.

This is not his body.

And this wrung-out spirit, half dead from despair, is not his spirit.

Somewhere inside himself, Courfeyrac feels the spark of his own self. But the misery carried by the other person, the one he's inhabiting--or replacing--or becoming--is so overwhelming that Courfeyrac is dragged along into it, and he finds himself growing cold with the knowledge that there is no good in the world.

As the skeletal person hobbles out of the building into a bitter-cold early morning, Courfeyrac studies as much of the surroundings as his shared gaze passes over, trying understand why he hurts so, why he's having trouble remembering how to put one foot in front of the other. Why he's so tired.

It's an ugly, decaying place he sees as he looked around in the predawn gray. The buildings are all squat rectangles without windows, the paths between them bare gravel trodden into mud in places. Smoke rises from a chimney on one of the buildings in the distance, and the strange, iron-tinged smell of it hangs over everything, making Courfeyrac's stomach flip over with hunger and nausea at the same time. A wide road runs down the middle of the place, and at the end of it, Courfeyrac can see a wall, with a metal gate and sharp-looking coils of wire along the top of it. At a corner of the wall, a tower looms above the compound, the figure of a soldier on guard silhouetted against the pale morning sky. A prison, then.

A sullen, cold drizzle is falling, the moisture collecting on Courfeyrac's rags and on his exposed skin, beading on his forehead and then running down his cheeks. The feeling is unfamiliar, as if something out of a dream or a distant childhood memory, and Courfeyrac has to wonder what happened in this place that could take away even a person's ability to cry.

It's in the faces of the people around him that he sees his answer. Up to now, the person whose vision he's sharing has looked mostly at the ground, or up at the walls of the camp and the distant buildings, even into the faces of the guards (pink under fur hats, sturdy with flesh, closed off as if they can't see what's around them, or refuse to). The one thing never in Courfeyrac's field of vision is the other prisoners, and he wants to know why. With a struggle, he turns the eyes he's seeing through onto the prisoners standing around him.

They look dead already. They're as thin as Courfeyrac's host, and many of them thinner. He can  _see_ the bones in their faces and necks. They wear ragged coats, filthy scarves, threadbare shirts--or just their own bare flesh in places, unprotected and blue-white with the cold. They are missing teeth, ears, fingers. Their skin is mottled with scars and old bruises and new frostbite, and they are  _so thin._

And in each of these faces, Courfeyrac can't stop seeing familiar ones--neighbors, family, friends. The memories his host tried to keep down come flooding back, and though the faces around him are not the ones he knows, he sees them anyway. He can't stop seeing them.

A brother, his eyes dull and his mouth bleeding where his teeth have been knocked out.

An aunt, her arms shaking as she tries to push herself to her feet in the slush.

A beloved neighbor, the laughter lines around his eyes disappearing as the skin tightens around the bones and the light in his eyes dies.

A daughter, listless; her hair falling out, her teeth falling out, her body wasting away to nothing.

A father, crying silently as he is pushed by the guards toward the group of the very young and the very old and the very weak, the ones who were marched into the long, low building and never seen again.

They have all been here. All are here no longer.

But they  _are_ here, not just in the memories of the one left behind, but actually, physically here in a way that Courfeyrac can't grasp at first. They are in the ground, he understands from the scattered thoughts of the mind he's sharing, but they were not buried there. They are in the air, but not as souls. (His host once believed in souls, but no longer.)

A fragment of ash drifts down from the sky and lands on his exposed wrist, the faint brush of a snowflake or a butterfly. And Courfeyrac  _knows._

The bodies were burned. The family, the neighbors, the friends--they are here in the ash that falls to earth, in the smoke that has saturated the walls and the ragged clothes and the soil, staining everything a dull gray. They are here in the heavy, pork smell that fills the air, that has Courfeyrac gagging in his borrowed body, his trembling legs folding up under him.

His host protests numbly, struggling to get back up, but the overpowering horror of the purpose of this place is too much for Courfeyrac, and he can't manage to stand. His vision is clouded with tears and he barely sees the guard who marches over, barking orders, a hand on his rifle.

* * *

It's a gray, chilly morning, and Bossuet is shivering in the predawn darkness, his hands jammed in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the cold drizzle.  _It figures we'd have miserable weather for this,_ he thinks, then is surprised at the thought. He always expects the worst, but he's usually relatively unperturbed by it when it does happen--and he actually doesn't mind rainy weather. 

It takes him a minute to realize it isn't exactly him who's in a bad mood.

"Come on, let's get this done," barks someone who Bossuet recognizes as his superior officer, even without knowing what his own role is, and Bossuet follows the man to a big, ugly carriage in a whole string of such carriages, all still waiting for their horses. Inside the back of the carriage--wagon might be a better word for it, he decides, wooden benches line the walls. Other men are there already, mostly big fellows in drag uniforms, their collars still pulled up against the rain.

Bossuet doesn't have any idea what's going on--he doesn't recognize the place, or the people, and the fashions and machines he sees around him are profoundly different from anything he knows. Clearly he's far from home. But it's not the first time he has (through no fault of his own) woken up in an unfamiliar place with no memory of how he got there.

Of course, this time, there's someone in his head--or rather, he's in someone else's head--so maybe it's a little out of the ordinary. But he doesn't let that bother him. Figuring that this fellow--this officer--knows better than he what has to be done, he's content to sit back and let him control the actions of their shared body.

It's a bit of a surprise when the carriages start moving all on their own, though. Bossuet may have accidentally ejected himself from law school, but he knows a thing or two, and he is  _certain_ there are no carriages like this in the world he knows. So this is perhaps another world altogether. Recalling Joly and Combeferre's more speculative late-night conversations, he's a little disappointed that the inhabitants of this world, other than their painfully shabby and ill-fitting clothing, look hardly different at all from the people he's accustomed to.

The carriages pull up into a small, cramped square, and Bossuet immediately feels at home in this neighborhood. The buildings are shabby and clearly packed to the corners with people, but the street is mostly clear of rubbish, and he can tell the homes are well cared for. It's a place people are proud to live, despite how little they have.

But as the body he's sharing opens the door and climbs out of the carriage, Bossuet feels the apprehension that fills the man, and underneath it, a deep, sour dislike for the place.

He isn't given a chance to examine the feeling, to try to figure out why, because an impossibly loud voice booms out scratchily from one of the vehicles. Bossuet is so surprised when he realizes it's the commanding officer (talking into a small black box in his hand that is somehow magnifying his voice, like a speaking trumpet only a hundred times more so) that he misses the first few minutes of the announcement.

"Your belongings will be transported to your new housing in the area prepared for your people," the commander is saying when Bossuet picks the thread of the speech back up again. "Cooperate with the officers moving you, and you and your possessions will arrive safely. Any resistance will taken as defying an officer of the law and will result in consequences. This escort is only for Blacks; Coloreds and Indians should report to the local resettlement office for your housing assignment with your people."

And Bossuet gets a glimpse of his host's dislike for the place in the image of light-skinned and dark-skinned people living side by side, and with a sinking feeling he realizes the new world may have better carriages, but it's plagued by problems very like the world he left.

The man is already striding toward the first house, where a woman stands in the doorway, still gaping in dismay at the news. She just blinks at him when he instructs her to move aside, and he pushes her (Bossuet cringes) roughly into the doorframe and strides past her to grab the first piece of furniture he sees and carry it out to the carriage.

After that, everything happens at once, and he gets mostly quick images, glimpses of violence and desperation among the chaos as he tries to disconnect from the things his hands (but not his hands) are doing.

"We won't move! We won't--"

"Look, the bulldozers are coming next week, whether you're in the house or not. How much of an idiot are you?"

"Next week, you said next week--today is only the 5th!"

"Don't throw it, that's--you bastard, you broke it!"

"I was  _born_ in this house. My  _mother_ was born in this house. You can't move us."

"I don't  _care_ if you had his babies, he's colored. They have their own place, now shut up and get on the truck."

"Put that stuff on another truck, this one's full. They'll sort it out when they get there.""

"In the name of God, please--"

"Out of my way, boy!"

There are screams, somewhere in the distance, but Bossuet tries not to hear.

He shoves a battered mattress into the back of the carriage and turns back to the hut to get the table. As he does so, he stumbles over something at knee height and almost falls. It's a toddler, about three years old, alone, naked except for a sagging pair of dirty shorts. He's crying--screaming, his arms outstretched in blind panic.

A wave of hate surges up in the policeman's mind at the sight of that small, dark face. The runny nose, the dense, curly hair. The grating screams. The ragged shorts. The panicked black eyes. The child is dirty and alone and terrified and the man  _hates him so much._

Bossuet feels it with him, and the world spins around him at the intensity of the man's hate.  _Animal_ flashes through his mind.  _Beggar._ And then worse.

The officer won't hit a child, so he turns away, hands shaking. A young man is lying in the mud in the street, desperately stretching out his body in front of one of the truck that's being loaded with his possessions--the sad, scrawny body a pathetic echo of the protests the residents had a few weeks ago, scores of them lying together in the roads.

"Get out of the road, you imbecile," he growls.

"We won't move," the young man rasps, the chant that sounded powerful two weeks ago coming out very different when repeated by just one voice in the cold darkness.

"I  _said,_ get out of the road!" Bossuet's host doesn't give the man a second chance. 

Bossuet, inside his head, is crying out, struggling to take control, but he can't; the man's will is too strong, and he's already raising the club. Bossuet feels the slick wood under his fingers, the jarring shock through the club as it connects with the man's head. He hears the strangled cry, sees the blood well up. He feels his breath hiss out between his teeth, almost a growl, as he brings the club down again--and again. The man screams and throws up an arm--bone cracks--warm blood splashes against Bossuet's skin.

He feels every moment of it, and he can do nothing to stop it.

* * *

Waking suddenly to blows is not a new experience for Feuilly--just one he hasn't faced in quite a long time. Automatically, he curls in on himself, raising his arms to protect his face, trying to gauge where and how many his attackers are. His mind, meanwhile, is racing:  _How are they in his flat? Or if not his flat_ \--and the damp stone beneath him says not-- _then where is he, and how did he get there?_

One of the attackers steps too close and Feuilly, seeing his chance, flings an arm around the unguarded leg, yanking on it suddenly and with enough force to topple the man to the ground, while at the same time kicking out against the others with his feet, taking them by surprise and driving them back enough for him to gather himself and plan his next move.

At least--that's what he tries to do.

But his arms don't respond, and his feet are similarly restrained, and his whole body feels . . . slow. Clumsy. Old. But something hard is still raining blows around his head; one ear is ringing and something cracks loudly in his shoulder, and he can't think straight. There's something wrong with his body, and he can't get his arms free, and all he can think to do is to curl up and wait for the beating to be done.

Finally, the blows stop. Feuilly, his cheek pressed into the wet stones, hears a voice sobbing raggedly, the sound loud in the sudden silence. It's him, he realizes.

A hand grips his shoulder and drags him up to a kneeling position. His hands are tied behind his back, the skin raw where the rope has rubbed against his wrists. Hunched as he is against the pain in his stomach, he manages to get a blurry view of the room he's in, all flat gray walls and sharp corners. A man in drab green clothing, his face indistinct through the tears swimming in Feuilly's eyes, stands back, his posture speaking both disgust and pride. He wears a red band around one arm, just above the elbow.

"Do you know why you are here?" he asks, as Feuilly coughs and struggles to get his breath back.

"No," Feuilly gasps. But, he realizes, he  _does_ \--he's know for weeks this would happen, that they were watching him, that no matter how obedient he was it was only a matter of time before they would drag him away . . . 

A wave of dizziness washes over him and he nearly topples over. How can he know all this but not know it? Someone behind him shakes him roughly and he manages to stay on his knees.

"You are an enemy of the people," the man hisses, bending over him. "Your loyalties lie not with your homeland, but with the foreigners who have tried time and time again to destroy us. Unable to defeat our armies in honest warfare, they are trying to poison the minds of our citizens, rotting us out from within through traitors like you."

"No," he begs, desperate. "I love my country. I hate the foreigners as much as you."

A sharp slap fills his mouth with the coppery tang of blood. "Liar!"

"Please, no; I would never betray my country. I know I worked for the university, but it was just a job, just what I did to earn money so that my children could eat. I wished I could work as an honest laborer--how I dreamed of it--but our country is so full of strong men, how can a weak, unfortunate little fellow like me find any real work? Please, I'm working now that there are jobs for everyone, I'm getting stronger every day, feel my arms, I'm not a traitor, I . . ."

He's babbling, and part of Feuilly knows that it's going to get him nowhere, not with bullies like this; he needs to shut up and watch and plan, to not show them how much they've hurt and frightened him already.

But another part of him--the part that feels different--is too terrified to think clearly. Because he knows what's ahead of him, the consequences if the labels these people are throwing at him stick. He's desperate to avoid it.

"How long have you been spying for our enemies?" the man shouts abruptly.

"Never! Please, I--"

"We  _know_ you are a spy; we have a witness. Someone who knows all about it turned you in. They told us everything--all the meetings, the secret messages, the payments."

Even with his memory fragmented and confused as it is, Feuilly knows this is untrue; he's never--not in either of the lives he remembers--worked as a spy for a foreign power.

"It's not true--they're lying!" he babbles frantically. "They must be the spy themselves, that's it, they're trying to pin their evildoing on someone else."

"Do you know who denounced you?" His accuser steps a little closer.

"No, but I'm sure they--"

"It was your son."

An image rises in Feuilly's mind, a little boy of about eight, with dark eyes and close-cropped hair and a guarded look about him. And the flood of emotion that rises up in him nearly suffocates him.

Never mind that he's never seen this child before in his life--this is his boy, his little son, the light of his life, his precious flower. He's told him ancient stories, held him when he shook with fever, guided his hand on the string of a kite, washed blood from his skinned knees, dried his tears when he sobbed over his dead grandfather. He loves this little one with ever fiber of his being.

And this boy betrayed him, knowing what his words would mean for his father.

"His story of your activities seemed very convincing," the man in green is saying. "But you are very passionate in your counter-accusations. Perhaps we should look into his case as well?"

"No," Feuilly sobs. "No, it's me. I'm the traitor. I betrayed my country." He slumps down over his knees, and this time nobody drags him back up. "Please, my son is innocent; I am the guilty one. I took the foreigners' money because I was lazy; I wanted them to conquer us so I could go back to my easy job at the university."

And the man with the red armband stands back and listens, a half-smile on his face, as Feuilly damns himself to a lifetime of torture.

* * *

Combeferre, faced with a number of unusual sensations, focuses first of all on the most uncomfortable one of all: Something is wrong with his mind. There is something _in there_ , something that should not be, and he doesn't know what it is or how it got there but it is _inside_ his mind and he doesn't know how to get it out--

On the verge of panic, he forces himself to take three deep breaths and reevaluate the situation. Logic--as difficult it is for him to follow it, with hysterics still threatening at the edge of his focus--points out that he doesn't actually know that the presence in his mind is necessarily bad, and so he shouldn't reject or embrace it until he can determine what it is that's in there (the thought makes him want to gag, but he takes another deep breath and forces himself to be rational about the situation).

Further examination reveals the extra thing in his mind is not, in fact, a thing, but a person. A person called Ten. Ten, for his part (and it  _is_ a "he"), seems entirely unaware of Combeferre's proximity, or at least unaffected by it. Combeferre, in the random thoughts of Ten's that flicker across his mind, can detect no trace of malice. He is forced to conclude that he is sharing mind-space with another man, someone in essential nature just like himself. (He notes the lingering revulsion he still feels at the thought and marvels at his seemingly groundless loyalty to his own mind over other perfectly equivalent minds, marking the phenomenon away for further reflection later on.)

Having satisfied himself that his mind is all right, Combeferre turns to the outward sensations that are bothering him. The main one, however, is hardly more outward than his mind; everything is shaking, a ceaseless, bone-rattling shake that seems to jar his most central organs. Looking around, he perceives that he is in a very small room made mostly of metal, that he is wearing a loose, one-piece garment of dull olive-colored fabric, and that he is alone. He also notes that the flesh of his hands--the only part of him visible outside his clothing--is not the color he is used to seeing, and concludes that he is inhabiting Ten's body.

Now that he realizes it, a hundred other differences come flooding into his awareness, hidden before under the overwhelming vibration of this small room, but now unmistakable: Ten's body is more slightly built than Combeferre's own; his vision is somewhat better, clearer than what Combeferre achieved even with corrective lenses; he has a very faint pain in his leg that the medical side of Combeferre's brain diagnoses as chronic discomfort from an old injury.

A crackling voice sounds right in Combeferre's--Ten's--ear, and he starts so violently he bangs his head against the sloping wall of the little room (the ringing thud reveals to him he's wearing a hat made out of some kind of metal; peculiar). The voice repeats itself, and Combeferre finds himself answering.

"Sorry, almost fell asleep. What'd you say?"

"I said, are you ready? We're nearly there."

"Ready," Ten confirms, and Combeferre finds the body he is borrowing (observing?) sliding through a nearby hatch and stretching out through a short tunnel-like passage toward what he somehow knows is a "scope." The word is unfamiliar but he's already parsing the root, wondering what it is he'll see when he looks through it, when Ten brings his eyes up to the lens--and Combeferre is left, for once in his life, absolutely unable to think.

He's flying.

He's in the air, a thousand meters above the ground, no, ten thousand meters. He can  _see_ the ground below him, all thick verdant forest and tiny rusty dirt roads winding through it, buildings here and there so small he hardly recognizes them for what they are; if there are humans below they are far too distant to see.

_How on earth is this happening?_ he wonders--and he finds that, as soon as he's stopped frantically analyzing in favor of simply asking a question, Ten's mind quickly supplies the answer, a word as familiar to him as his fingers:  _Airplane._ Combeferre understands that this is the name of the machine he's in, that it's a man-made device that relies on the burning of fuel to raise people--and other cargo--miles above the earth's surface in perfect safety.

_What year is it?_ he asks himself purposefully. The answer immediately pops into his mind as if he'd known it all along:  _1968._

Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight! It's well into the twentieth century--and just look at the marvels humankind has accomplished! Combeferre is giddy with glee, watching the ground fly by below him, exulting in the dizzying height and the sheer enormity of the accomplishment. Never mind that they've been forever bound to the earth by the solidity of their anatomy and the inescapable laws of Nature: Give them a hundred years, and humans will learn to fly.

And if they've accomplished flight, just imagine what  _other_ wonders humans have surely brought about in the years that have passed since the world Combeferre knows. His mind reels, thinking of all the fields that must have advanced in leaps and bounds--medicine, philosophy, astronomy, botany, exploration, magnetism . . . If they can fly, surely humans can explore the depths of the ocean--name every one of ten thousand insects--explain the mysteries of the stars--cure every disease that once plagued humankind.

He's just about to ask his mental companion about all this when the voice in his ear returns.

"Ready?"

"Ready," Ten replies again, and Combeferre feels his hands tightening on a kind of lever. His stomach gives a sickening lurch as the ground swoops up toward him in the narrow view through the scope. His hands are sweating, and a thrill of expectation runs through him--what for, he doesn't know. They're flying  _so close_ to the ground now, rooftops racing past beneath them in a blur. The voice speaks in his ear again and Combeferre doesn't even know what it says, but his hand reflexively pulls on the lever--he shouts back a response--the aircraft shudders and then lifts quickly away from the ground.

Below them, a row of houses explodes into flame and smoke.

And Combeferre knows instinctively what they've done, would know it even without the correlation of his actions with the event, even without the background knowledge available from the mind he shares with Ten (and Ten has been on the other side of this transaction as well; Combeferre senses memories of flattened houses still radiating heat, of the scent of charred flesh and the acrid smell of the chemicals that sear skin and lungs)--because of course, he should have known from the very beginning, he was a fool for not guessing it at once.

Give humans sticks, and they'll hit one another with them. Give humans the power of flight, and they'll use it to kill one another.

He wants to cry, to scream in anger and despair at one more failure of the human race to live up to its potential for greatness. But his own emotional response is at odds with his host's: From Ten he only feels exultation at a solid hit, one more successful mission, one step closer to victory, mingled with incredulous joy that they got in and out and nobody got hurt. Combeferre, heartsick, wants to weep--but Ten is laughing with relief.

* * *

Prouvaire is surprised and delighted to wake up and find himself transformed into a woman. He's always wondered what it would be like to be a woman--whether it would feel fundamentally different, whether the physical body had any effect on the soul that inhabited it, whether skirts and petticoats were more comfortable than trousers (he'd always suspected yes)--and had always felt a little bit sad that he would never be able to know. What a gift, to have his wish granted!

He--she--they (for as he examines his mind for signs of a change due to its new housing, he realizes that he is not alone, but sharing this body with the mind of its original owner) are a very young woman, a girl still, in fact. She has dark skin, slender limbs, long black hair that she skillfully braids into two plaits that she ties off with bits of string. Apparently unaware of the other spirit inhabiting her body, she continues with her morning chores. She carries water from a spring off in the lush green forest; she feeds the two wiry little goats that are kept in a pen behind the hut; she brings twigs to the older woman who is coaxing the fire in the open hearth back to life.

And then it is time to go to school.

Prouvaire is taken aback at the sharp wave of fear that floods over them at the thought. But the girl doesn't let the feeling show; she just picks up her bag, kisses her mother goodbye, grabs a piece of fruit to eat on the way, and heads off down the trail through the jungle.

It is a beautiful countryside, all small, steep hillsides thickly overgrown with plants Prouvaire has never seen the like of, with huge leaves and extravagant flowers in scarlet, orange, and canary yellow. The air is cool in the early morning--the sun has not quite risen--and as they leave the scent of smoke from the family hearth behind, it is fresh and full of the scents of a thousand unfamiliar flowers and fruits. Prouvaire is agog at the beauty and wants to break out into song as they come over the crest of a hill and see the jungle spread out below them, lit up with the first rays of the sun.

What it must be like to  _live_ in a place like this, to experience this sublimity every morning! Prouvaire regrets the girl's apparent deafness to his thoughts, wishing he could converse with her, talk to her firsthand about her life. She has surely seen how these mountains look in a summer thunderstorm, and if he could just communicate with her, she could perhaps imagine the scene for him, so he could share it.

But the girl is unmoved by the beauty and resolutely, almost obsessively, silent. She walks so that her feet do not scuff on the dirt path, and holds her bag tight against her body to avoid it rustling. As Prouvaire's initial rapture dies down, he begins to see the jungle through her eyes--and what they see, on every side, is danger.

_Tigers,_ he thinks belatedly. Tigers live in tropical jungles--as do cobras and those deadly poisonous frogs in the jewel-like colors. No wonder the girl is scared, to be passing through their territory alone, without a rifle or even a saber to protect herself with.

But no, it's not animals she's afraid of at all. Prouvaire finds that by releasing his own thoughts, stepping back from them and letting them fade, he can perceive what the girl is thinking about, what it is she is so afraid of.

Men.

There are men in the jungle--perhaps not in this particular part of the jungle, perhaps not today, perhaps they are hunting elsewhere this morning. But they are out there, somewhere. And they are hunting for girls like her.

Memories flicker through the girl's mind, stories she's heard. Girls like her, snatched on their way to school. Girls walking alone, girls in groups (six at one time, they mutter around the fire at night, and a whole village left to mourn), girls on bicycles. Older girls, nearly adults at fourteen. Babies as young as four. It has happened to hundreds of strangers--and it happened to her cousin, just ten months ago.

The kidnapped girls are almost never seen again, but everyone knows what happens to them. They are taken down out of the mountains, to the city, there to work as slaves and whores, made to do the most disgusting things for any man who will pay for their time. They almost never come back to their home villages--not because they are taken so far away and no one knows where they are, but because prostitutes make their owners a lot of money, and to buy one back is more than any family can afford. Every day when this child kisses her mother goodbye, she knows it might be the last time she ever sees her.

But she can't  _not_ go to school. She has discussed it with her parents, weighing the odds, and they've decided it is best that she continues going. Everyone says that's the way to make something of yourself, to get a better life. If you don't go to school, what do you have to look forward to? All you can do is to stay in the hills, marry someone from a neighboring village, become a farmer or a farmer's wife and spend the rest of your days struggling to feed your family. Praying the weather holds and you don't lose a crop and face the choice of selling one child or watching them all starve.

She has dreams, this child. She wants to become a scientist. Her teacher has told her that there are scientists who study plants, who learn better ways to take care of crops and even create better crops--rice that the rot doesn't hurt, palm trees that will grow strong, even high up in the mountains. She sees every day how much these plants would help her community, and she wants to go to the big city as a scientist, to discover these crops there and bring them home. You have to study a long time to become one of those scientists, her teacher tells her. And so she braves the jungle and the men there every day, and she works hard on her mathematics and her writing, and she prays that she will be spared so she can bring these good things to her community.

Prouvaire and the girl round a bend in the trail and below them it's a long, gentle slope down to the clearing where the school is, a squat building of gray blocks and a rusty metal roof. A stick cracks behind them in the jungle (probably just an animal, but you never know), but they are safe now, and they fly down the path, feet pounding confidently over the uneven ground, toward the school--and seven more hours of safety.

* * *

It doesn't take Joly long to figure out that something very strange is going on. For one thing, he's usually pretty quick to wake up, and though there have been a few mornings after late nights with Bossuet and Grantaire when it's taken him a few minutes to become fully aware of his surroundings, he's certainly never managed to get dressed and go out before waking up. Yet here he is, wearing a pair of fawn-colored trousers that certainly don't belong to him (his own clothes are much better fitting) and a loose linen shirt (and an appalling lack of waistcoat or cravat or hat) and bending over a sick child to examine her.

Also, he's become a woman. Which is unusual as well.

It's clearly not the present, either. The woman is wearing a miniature watch on her wrist, the glass face perfectly polished and the intricate, tiny hands beautiful in their workmanship. Her clinic contains devices unfamiliar to Joly--but which he somehow understands nonetheless, as her gaze passes over him; one of them allows her to speak with people hundreds of miles away, while another lets him listen to a patient's heartbeat (although on further reflection, Joly recognizes a much-modified version of the tool they use at the Necker, and immediately admires the flexible design and wonders about the material).

Joly's head swims with questions--when, why, how?--but there is a patient before him, and he sets everything else aside for the time being.

The little girl has a fever and leans listlessly against her mother's chest. The mother describes the child's other symptoms--chills the night before, vomiting this morning--and the doctor shakes her head (and it's a strange experience, Joly discovers, feeling someone else shake your own head for you). It's malaria, the doctor says; she needs a medicine called Chloroquine.

But the clinic is out. The medicine is expensive, and there is no money for more drugs until more funding comes in from the wealthy governments of the world. The doctor counsels the mother to give her child plenty of boiled water to drink and to keep insects away from her. (Looking at the open window, through which the flies have been swarming in and out throughout the examination, Joly wonders how practicable this instruction is.) The instructions hang heavy with a weight Joly recognizes well: The knowledge that the treatment may not be enough to save the patient, the inability to do anything else.

The next patient to come in has an ailment similar to the cholera that Joly is all too familiar with, and Joly glances around the clinic for leeches. But instead, the doctor is, again, apologizing for not having the medicine that would help the woman. She tells her to drink plenty of boiled water and rest. (Again, the boiled water--Joly is gratified to find a medical endorsement of the tea he is so fond of taking for any kind of trouble, even if it comes from a future doctor, but finds it odd the woman didn't even think to bleed the patient.) The doctor's heart is heavy as she watches the woman limp out, leaning on a relative's arm.

And on and on; the patients keep coming in, and Joly finds it harder and harder to keep up his spirits every time the doctor opens her mouth it's to say, "Sorry, we don't have the medicine you need."

Is this what the future is? The grand new age of progress and happiness? Humanity has discovered the drugs to cure the diseases that plague it . . . but they're too expensive for the people who need them. Joly is confused; he'd have expected a century or more of progress to make more of a difference. A better understanding of diseases is a wonderful thing, of course--but what good is it, really, if the doctors still can't cure them?

It's almost a relief when a groaning man is carried in, clutching a bloody trouser leg. Joly recognizes the problem at once, and knows exactly what is needed. The man has a broken leg--a farming accident, the friends who carried him in say--and it needs to be set.

To Joly's surprise, the doctor is nervous about the treatment. Her hands shake as she examines the wound. It's bad--the bone is jutting from the flesh, and the man has lost a good deal of blood--but not terrible. If the man doesn't get a fever, he should be fine. All that needs to be done is to quickly set the bone and close up the wound before the man goes into shock.

But the doctor hesitates, tripping over her tongue as she apologizes to the man and his friends. They don't have the drugs the man needs, she says. This is going to hurt him a lot, but they've run out of the drug that dulls the pain.

For a minute, Joly is awestruck--this woman is used to working on patients without them experiencing pain!--and then he notices how hesitantly she is proceeding with the leg, the man's tortured moaning under her hands just making her more unsure. He hasn't tried to influence the woman's actions yet, but now he gently steps in to move her hands, deftly setting the bone and stitching up the wound it left before backing out again and letting the woman whose body he's sharing take control again. Filled with relief at the job finished, she seems not to have noticed the intruder.

It's only after the man is carried out again, leaving the doctor to scrub his blood from her table, that Joly thinks to wonder how expensive these medicines are. They must be incredibly costly, of course, for the things they can do are nothing short of miraculous (Joly is still reeling, just thinking of operating on a patient without them experiencing pain). And people here are dying for lack of these drugs, so surely the organizations the woman mentioned are sending them just as quickly as they can buy them.

Tiptoeing into the woman's memories, he finds the price--but it's all in a currency he's not familiar with. What is a cent? Twenty-five of them would pay for the sick child's cure, eight tablets that would cure her malaria, possibly save her life.  _ How much is twenty-five cents worth? _ he wonders idly.

The answer comes unbidden from the woman's store of knowledge. Twenty-five cents is half the price of a small roll of bread. It's the cost of sending a letter across town. It's the price of a very small piece of candy.

Joly understands the future even less than he'd thought.

 


	3. quel horizon

Enjolras arrives at the Musain the moment it opens. He manages a polite greeting when Louison opens the door for him, but goes up immediately to the back room. He has been up all night--or ever since waking up from the dream--pacing, going back and forth between believing it was a simple nightmare caused by an overexcited imagination and believing it was . . . something more.

Combeferre is there already, sitting at a table in the far corner, his head in his hands, scribbled papers scattered across the table in front of him.

"You're here early--earlier than early," Enjolras says.

Combeferre raises his head. His face is ghost-pale and there are dark circles under his eyes. "They let me in before opening," he says dully. "I . . . had a strange dream, and I needed a quiet place to think, so I came here."

"You had a dream as well?"

A spark of concern breaks Combeferre's glassy stare. "You too?"

"I dreamed about the future," Enjolras says. He sinks into a chair next to Combeferre. "It was . . . not as I hoped."

"In what way?"

Enjolras relates the dream--sharing another man's head, his knowledge of the war tearing the continent in two, the possible end of France, the boy dying horribly under his command--and Combeferre's palor increases.

"My dream was different, but equally awful. It was some time in the future, and, Enjolras, humans had learned to _fly._ I was flying, in the dream, not by myself, but in a machine that a man could pilot. But we used the machine . . . we used it only to kill other humans more efficiently. We destroyed an entire town with a flick of a finger."

Enjolras lays a hand on his shoulder. "It was just a dream. Wasn't it?" The last part is a whisper, as if he doesn't dare give full voice to the words.

"Does it matter?" Combeferre asks. "I was up all night thinking about it--I couldn't stop--and the conclusion that I came to was that the _nature_ of the dream, or . . . vision . . . or whatever it might be, is immaterial. The _content_ of it is true either way; humankind will use whatever progress we achieve for our own destruction. It's simply our nature."

He rubs his eyes, wearily. "I've always believed that moral progress would accompany the scientific, that as we grow, humans will become better creatures, than on the whole the gains will outweigh the losses as we move forward. But I didn't see any evidence of that in the dream--our tools had changed tremendously, and we were the same wretched creatures we've always been. One wonders whether there is an imperative to work toward progress after all."

He meets Enjolras's desperate gaze and sighs. "But to your question, no, I'm . . . not sure it was a dream. It didn't feel like a dream."

"It felt real. I think . . . I think it _was_ real." Enjolras shuts his eyes. "That war--it really happened, or is going to happen--and I shared in a moment of it."

The door swings open and Courfeyrac is there, hatless, his waistcoat buttoned askew, eyes red-rimmed and cheeks streaked with tear tracks. He stumbles into the room, meets his friends' haunted eyes. "Did you--"

"Have a dream about a different time?" Enjolras asks. "Yes, both of us were in the future."

"It wasn't a dream," Courfeyrac says quietly, hesitantly. "It was real."

"Yes, I think it was," Combeferre replies.

As if the words break something inside him, Courfeyrac slumps into a chair and lays his head down on the table, sobbing.

Enjolras rubs his shoulders. "Courfeyrac, what did you see?"

"It--it was a prison," Courfeyrac gasps. "No, not a prison, something else--a place to kill people. And I was inside someone else, seeing through their eyes and I--I couldn't help it, I . . ." He raises a tear-streaked face. "I think I killed them."

"Maybe it was just a dream after all," Combeferre starts, but Courfeyrac shakes his head violently.

"No, it was a real; I know it was. And I caused a real death." He drops his head back on his arms, inconsolable.

"What does it mean?" Enjolras murmurs to Combeferre. "Why did this happen?"

"I don't know." Combeferre sounds hopelessly lost.

The others trickle in ones and twos, all shaken in their own ways.

Prouvaire woke up to a note in Bahorel's messy scrawl shoved under his door ( _Feeling strange. Went to walk it off. Probably won't be at the meeting._ ) and the brusque, bare prose was worrying enough to make him seek the big man out. He found him back in his apartment, patching himself up, and convinced him to come to meet the others after all. Bahorel has two shallow knife cuts on his arms from the gang that jumped him as he was wandering restlessly by the river, and his nose is probably broken once again, but he's calmer now. He picks sullenly at the table with his knife while Prouvaire listens to the others' stories and asks probing questions.

Feuilly stops by on his way to work, tired and in a quiet mood, but not terribly upset. It's not until he hears the others' experiences and realizes that his own dream wasn't a dream at all, as he had thought, that he starts to shake. Enjolras pulls out a chair for him, and Courfeyrac puts an arm around his shoulders. Combeferre pointedly continues lecturing Bahorel about his cursorytreatment of his knife wounds until Feuilly is calm enough to tell his story in quiet, broken sentences.

Bossuet and Joly come in arm in arm, but whereas it's usually a jaunty saunter, now they seem to be clinging to one another for dear life; even after they sit down, Joly keeps a hand on Bossuet's arm. He had opened the door that morning to go in search of his friend and found him on the threshold, just raising his hand to knock.

"We went to the Corinthe first," Joly explains, "but no one was there. Has anyone seen Grantaire?" No one has. Joly still seems worried, but he relates his dream, and Bossuet sums his up in a few short sentences. Bossuet is solemn, almost silent; Joly puts on a cheerier face, doing most of the talking for them both, but his attempt at optimism is obviously forced--which is frightening, coming from him.

The talk is scattered at first, as the students fill each other in on the portions of their stories they haven't heard yet, but eventually it coalesces into a single conversation, and they put together the pieces.

"Everything was dying and I could do nothing."

"Nothing bad happened, but I was _so afraid_ the whole time. Because it could have happened."

"The hate was so strong, I felt sick."

"They made his son inform against him--and for nothing more than being a teacher."

"So many years in the future, and we didn't even have basic supplies."

"They died because of me."

"Is progress even a good thing, if it just means greater suffering can be accomplished?"

Someone asks Combeferre, for the second time that morning, "What does it mean?"

And as all eyes turn to him, he's unable to do more than whisper, "I don't know."

In the long, solemn silence that follows, the door to the back room slams open, shattering the stillness, and Grantaire swaggers in. Already drunk, at seven in the morning, he slides a chair across the floor with a loud scrape and tumbles into it.

"Are you all right?" Bossuet asks him. "What did you see?"

"See?" Grantaire looks at him challengingly.

"We all saw--experienced--a piece of the future," Combeferre explains.

Grantaire's lips twist in a bitter grin. "I spent the first half of the night drinking, and the second half passed out in the rubbish heap in back of the Corinthe." His eyes flick over to Enjolras for a split second. "I didn't see anything besides the black of my own eyelids."

Enjolras doesn't seem to hear, his lips moving soundlessly. He raises his head and speaks a little louder. "I know what it means." He pushes himself up from his chair, and the room's attention turns to him. "I know what it means. We've been given a gift.

"It doesn't seem like a gift, I know," he continues over Bossuet's snort of bitter laughter. "But it is. It's a warning of what the world could be--what it _will_ be, if we don't succeed in our goals. But it's also a motivation. Because we can change what we saw.

"And what--what besides the injustices we see around us every day--could give us greater passion than these glimpses of future wrongs that we can prevent? I've always fought to deliver France from her oppressors, but now I'll have the memory of these future sufferings to spur me on as well, and I'll fight for a different future for my homeland.

"And things _will_ be different _._ That's the whole point of the revolution--it's what we've always been doing--only now we can see it so much more clearly. We're fighting _to change the course of history._ "

Enjolras's face is pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes, but he's never looked so much a god of war as he does now--fierce and determined and unstoppable. "These visions we've seen are the cost, if things go on as they have--but they _won't,_ because we are going to change everything," he declares.

"My friends, the twentieth century can still be happy."


	4. epilogue

Grantaire awakes with a start, bringing his drooping head up sharply and drawing a snicker from the person sitting behind him. Blinking his bleary eyes, he looks around an unfamiliar room: Brightly lit, sloping floor, chairs in stark rows filled with young people wearing poorly fitting clothes. Everything is completely strange--the styles of clothing, the machine depicted on the wall in the front of the room, the garish colors on the pages of the book lying open in front of him--and for a moment Grantaire's head reels.

Then he notices the older man (bearded, bespectacled, wearing a faded brown jacket not quite as poorly tailored as the other garments in the room) standing at the front of the room and droning on in a tone that--despite the unfamiliar words he keeps using--is entirely recognizable as a professor lecturing, and everything settles into comforting comprehensibility. He is in a university lecture. He'll have to take care Bahorel doesn't find out about this, or Grantaire will never hear the end of it.

He settles back in a more comfortable slouch in his seat, and looks down at the book in front of him. The pictures are bizarre, depicting what _appears_ to be a person in some sort of baggy, shiny outfit, standing in a barren gray landscape under a brilliant night sky. A huge, bug-like machine (creature?) hunches next to the man, but the man seems unconcerned. Grantaire frowns at the caption, which mentions the date 1969 and claims that it shows the first person to set foot on the moon.

Perhaps, Grantaire thinks, he's misunderstood the nature of this gathering after all. The older man is talking about another moon mission now, one that had to turn back halfway through the voyage due to their craft malfunctioning--but all the students Grantaire can see are just staring at him glassy-eyed or ignoring him entirely to write or draw on papers in front of them. This must be some kind of entertainment, a fictional story that has lost its hearers' interest by being too far-fetched.

Grantaire flips to the front of the book in front of him: _Histoire de la France dans la Monde Moderne,_ it reads, in large yellow letters on a shiny cover that is unlike any kind of leather binding he's ever encountered. _Histoire as in "story," right?_ he thinks. But when he flips through the early pages of the book, he sees things in it he recognizes. Things that are true.

Really interested now, he scans the text summarizing the revolution, the beheading of Louis XVI, the Terror, the subsequent dissolving of the new order. Everything is correct, as far as he knows, and the book supplies some details and makes some connections he was unaware of. As the lecturer goes on to talk about something called a "missile crisis," Grantaire reads on about the rise and fall of Napoleon. And then the events discussed in the book are ones he remembers--the double vote law, the Trois Glorieuses. Everything is true, right up to the last year he remembers--1831. But the text goes on.

"The July Revolution had established a constitutional monarchy and replaced Charles X with the more liberal Louis-Philippe, but the republicans who saw one king as no different from another were still discontented, and felt that their revolution had been snatched out of their hands by monarchists. In the summer of 1832, these tensions boiled over into another insurrection; a number of student groups contributed to the planning of this revolt, chief among them a group known as the Amis de l'ABC.

"The revolt began on June 5, 1832, at the funeral of the liberal statesman General Lamarque. Sparked by the student groups and quickly picked up by other angry citizens, the uprising spread across the eastern and central of Paris, and barricades were raised on a number of major streets, armed by euphoric insurgents demanding liberty for all of France."

It's the end of the page. Grantaire swallows hard, his hands suddenly clammy and fumbling as he turns the page over.

"However, the revolt was as short-lived as it was enthusiastic. Despite the initial positive response shown by the crowds at Lamarque's funeral, the large majority of Parisians remained unmoved by revolutionary spirit. Most of the barricades were destroyed and their defenders killed or captured by the end of the night, with the final barricade falling just after midday on June 6. The casualties of the uprising numbered 800: The army and national guard saw 344 wounded and 73 killed, while the insurgents lost 291 wounded and 93 killed, including every member of the Friends of the ABC."

Grantaire wants to cry; he finds himself laughing nervously under his breath. (A student in the next row glares at him, but he hardly notices.) He scans the page for more, but the text moves on to other things. Half frantic, he flips to the next page, then farther ahead in the book, searching for another mention of the group, for more connections or a growing trend toward freedom--for any indication that the events he just read about played any role in the larger history of France.

But there is nothing. The history moves on, without any sign that those three paragraphs meant anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my beta readers, oilan and mamzellecombeferre, for their invaluable help.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at takethewatch.tumblr.com.


End file.
